A conference call is a conference by telephone in which two or more parties in different locations participate by means of a central switching unit, such as a cloud-based bridge. Before connecting to the central switching unit, parties who are located on the same premise are often connected to a local on-premise switch when a conference call is made.
In the currently state of the art, if one or more parties are located off the premise or at a different location, the local on-premise switch connects each on-premise party dialing into the conference call individually to a conference call bridge. This technique is inefficient, because it not only wastes bandwidth available on the bridge, it also adds costs associated with the premise for each individual conference call connection.
Therefore, what is needed is a new method and apparatus for optimizing conference calls between parties who are on-premise and off-premise without sacrificing bandwidths on the bridge and costs associated in making individual connections to the bridge.